Inspection shows certain attributes of the social structure. A given merchant community is ordinarily very close, both in the frequency of interaction and in ethnic and family ties. The wholesale diamond market in New York City, for example, is Jewish, with a high degree of intermarriage, living in the same community in Brooklyn, and going to the same synagogues. It is essentially a closed community.

XREF: Connects to the classic economics/social-capital literature on the diamond trade as a closed network, echoing Granovetter's work on embeddedness.

Coleman, SocialCapitalCreation-1988, loc. 46